♦He returns to France.♦
He apprehended no difficulty in this: any military opposition which could be attempted he despised, the more entirely because of the ease with which the Spanish armies had been dispersed, ... and the moral obstacles he was still incapable of appreciating. A dispatch reached him from Galicia, and upon reading it he said to those about him, “Every thing proceeds well. Romana cannot resist a fortnight longer. The English will never make another effort; and three months hence the war will be at an end.” One of the marshals hinted at the character of the people and of the country. “It is a La Vendée,” he replied; “I have tranquillized La Vendée. Calabria also was in a state of insurrection, ... wherever there are mountains there are insurgents; but the kingdom of Naples is tranquil now. It is not enough to command an army well, ... one must have general views. The continental system is not the same as in the time of Frederick; the great powers must absorb the smaller. The priests have considerable influence here, and they use it to exasperate the people: but the Romans conquered them; the Moors conquered them; and they are not near so fine a people now as they were then. I will settle the government firmly; I will interest the nobles, and I will cut down the people with grape-shot. What do they want? the Prince of Asturias? Half the nation object to him: ... besides he is dead to them. There is no longer any dynasty to oppose to me. They say the population is against us. Why Spain is a perfect solitude, ... there are not five men to a square league. Besides, if it ♦Jones’s Account of the War, vol. i. 165.♦ be a question of numbers, I will pour all Europe into their country. They have to learn what a first-rate power can effect.” With this flagitious determination the remorseless tyrant returned into France.
♦Professions to the Spaniards at Madrid.♦
Before he left Madrid to march against the English, an address framed by the traitors of that city in the name of the magistrates and citizens was presented to him by the Corregidor. They thanked him for his gracious clemency, that in the midst of conquest he had thought of the safety and welfare of the conquered, and forgiven all which had been done during the absence of Joseph, their king: and they entreated that it might please him to grant them the favour of seeing King Joseph once more among them, to the end that under his laws that capital and the whole kingdom might enjoy the happiness which they expected from the benevolence of their new sovereign’s character. The tyrant replied to this in one of his characteristic harangues. “I am pleased,” he said, “with the sentiments of the city of Madrid. I regret the injuries she has suffered, and am particularly happy that, under existing circumstances, I have been able to effect her deliverance, and to protect her from great calamities, and have accomplished what I owed to myself and my nation. Vengeance has had its due: it has fallen upon ten of the principal culprits; ... the rest have entire and absolute forgiveness.” He then touched upon the reforms by which he thought to reconcile the Spaniards to a foreign yoke. “I have preserved the spiritual orders, but with a limitation of the number of monks: they who were influenced by a divine call shall remain in their cloisters; with regard to those whose call was doubtful, or influenced by worldly considerations, I have fixed their condition in the class of secular priests. Out of the surplus of monastic property I have provided for the maintenance of the pastors, that important and useful branch of the clergy. I have suppressed that court which was a subject of complaint to Europe and the present age. Priests may guide the minds of men, but must exercise no temporal or corporal jurisdiction over the citizens. I have annulled those privileges which the grandees usurped during times of civil war. I have abolished feudal rights, and henceforth every one may set up inns, ovens, mills, employ himself in fishing and rabbit-hunting, and give free scope to his industry, provided he respects the laws. The selfishness, wealth, and prosperity of a small number of individuals were more injurious to your agriculture than the heat of the Dog-days. All peculiar jurisdictions were usurpations, and at variance with the rights of the nation. I have abolished them. As there is but one God, so should there be in a state but one judicial power.
“There is no obstacle,” he continued, “which can long resist the execution of my resolutions. But what transcends my power is this, to consolidate the Spaniards as one nation, under the sway of the king, should they continue to be affected with those principles of hatred to France which the partizans of England and the enemies of the continent have infused into the bosom of Spain. I can establish no nation, no king, no independence of the Spaniards, if the king be not assured of their attachment and fidelity. The Bourbons can no longer reign in Europe. The divisions of the royal family were contrived by the English. It was not the dethronement of King Charles and of the favourite, that the Duke del Infantado, that tool of England, had in view. The intention was, to establish the predominant influence of England in Spain; a senseless project, the result of which would have been a perpetual continental war. No power under the influence of England can exist on the continent. If there be any that entertain such a wish, the wish is absurd, and will sooner or later occasion their fall. It would be easy for me, should I be compelled to adopt that measure, to govern Spain, by establishing as many viceroys in it as there are provinces. Nevertheless, I do not refuse to abdicate my rights of conquest in favour of the king, and to establish him in Madrid, as soon as the 30,000 citizens which this capital contains, the clergy, nobility, merchants, and lawyers shall have declared their fidelity, set an example to the provinces, enlightened the people, and made the nation sensible that their existence and prosperity essentially depend upon a king and a free constitution, favourable to the people, and hostile only to the selfishness and haughty passions of the grandees. If such be the sentiments of the inhabitants, let the 30,000 citizens assemble in the churches; let them, in the presence of the holy sacrament, take an oath, not only with their mouths, but also with their hearts, and without any jesuitical equivocation, that they promise support, attachment, and fidelity to their king; let the priests in the confessional and the pulpit, the merchants in their correspondence, the lawyers in their writings and speeches, infuse these sentiments into the people: ... then will I surrender my right of conquest, place the king upon the throne, and make it my pleasing task to conduct myself as a true friend of the Spaniards. The present generation may differ in their opinions; the passions have been too much brought into action; but your grandchildren will bless me as their renovator; they will reckon the day when I appeared among you among their memorable festivals; and from that day will the happiness of Spain date its commencement. Thus,” he concluded, addressing himself to the Corregidor, “you are informed of the whole of my determination. Consult with your fellow-citizens, and consider what part you will choose; but whatever it be, make your choice with sincerity, and tell me only your genuine sentiments.”
There was something more detestable in this affectation of candour and generosity than in his open and insolent violence. “Consult! and consider what part you will choose, and make your choice with sincerity!”... The Spanish nation had made their choice! They had made it at Baylen and at Reynosa, at Cadiz and at Madrid, at Valencia and at Zaragoza; for life or for death; deliberately, and yet as if with one impulse, ... with enthusiasm, and yet calmly, ... had that noble people nobly, and wisely, and religiously made their heroic choice. They had written it in blood, their own and their oppressors’. Its proofs were to be seen in deserted houses and depopulated towns, in the blackened walls of hamlets which had been laid waste with fire, in the bones which were bleaching upon the mountains of Biscay, and in the bodies, French and Spaniard, which were at that hour floating down the tainted Ebro! Here, in the capital, their choice had been recorded; they who had been swept down by grape-shot in its streets, or bayoneted in the houses, they who had fallen in the heat of battle before its gates, and they who in cold blood had been sent in droves to execution, alike had borne witness to that choice, and confirmed it, and rejoiced in it with their dying breath. And this tyrant called upon the people of Madrid now to tell him their sentiments, ... now when their armies were dispersed, and they themselves, betrayed and disarmed, were surrounded by his legions!
♦Registers opened.♦
Registers were opened in every quarter, and, if French accounts could be believed, 30,000 fathers of families rushed thither in crowds, and signed a supplication to the conqueror, entreating him to put an end to their misfortunes, by granting them his august brother Joseph for their king. If this impossible eagerness had really been manifested, it could admit of no other solution than that the people of Madrid, bitterly as they detested and heartily as they despised Joseph, yet thought it a less evil to be governed by him than by the tyrant himself, ... for this was the alternative allowed them. But a census of this kind, as it is called, like those which coloured Buonaparte’s assumption, first of the consulship for life, and then of an hereditary throne, was easily procured, when neither threats, nor persuasions, nor fraud, nor violence were spared.
♦The people of Madrid take the oath of allegiance to Joseph.♦
The ceremony of voting and taking the oath was delayed till after Buonaparte’s departure, “because,” said the French journalists, “a suspicion of fear might else have attached to it. The act was now more noble, as being entirely free, ... as being confirmed by the weightiest considerations whereby a people can be influenced, their interest, their happiness, and their glory.” With such language the better part of the French nation were insulted, and the unreflecting deceived, while all knowledge of the real state of things was shut out by the vigilance of a government, conscious enough of wickedness to know that it required concealment. The votes were then exacted, the host was exposed in all the churches, and the priests were compelled to receive from their countrymen at the altar, and as they believed in the actual and bodily presence of their Saviour and their God, a compulsory oath of allegiance to the Intruder. The Catholic system has a salvo in such cases; and the same priests who administered the oath were believed by the French themselves to have released those who took it from its obligations.